Once you've established "High Noon" as one of your favorite movie Westerns, it's a bit difficult to expect Gary Cooper to match performances against his portrayal of Marshal Will Kane. "Man Of The West" came only six years after "High Noon", but Cooper seems much older, and his actions seem indecisive in the early going, something that frustrated me to some extent. As in the cabin, when Coaley (Jack Lord) taunted Billie Ellis (Julie London) to strip down in front of the Tobin gang; I was straining for Link (Cooper) to make a stand. Maybe he would have if the ploy with Dock hadn't worked. Certainly, Link had his say with Coaley later on in that great brawl where the tables were reversed and Coaley was challenged to say how it feels to be degraded. It was a redemptive moment that set up the carnage to follow.
As for rest of the Tobin gang, they were a pretty nasty bunch, led perhaps by the meanest hombre of all, old Dock Tobin as portrayed by Lee J. Cobb. The rest of the Tobin's were pretty well cast, with Royal Dano doing another nice job again as the somewhat off center Trout. He kept you guessing as to whether he couldn't speak, or just wouldn't speak, until the confrontation at Lassoo, and even then it's hard to draw a conclusion. But John Dehner I think, might have given the best performance I've ever seen him in. Usually, as a character actor, he's called upon to perform a cardboard cut out villain, but here he really presented a serious obstacle to the film's hero, as well as a challenge to the authority of the Tobin patriarch. He seemed a bit larger than life in his role, something I can't say about a lot of his other work.
Something curious, you would think with Julie London's successful singing career and her casting here as the saloon girl with the golden voice, that she would actually get to sing a song! I wonder why no one thought of that. The other thing I took note of was the price of a train ticket from Crosscut to Fort Worth, coming in at $8.35. I have no idea of the distance involved, but that seemed a little steep for the late 1800's. Maybe that was for first class.
Anyway, a fairly standard Western with the expected outcome, even if the finale seemed a bit forced, with a dead man rolling all the way down a side of a steep incline instead of just dropping in his tracks. Thinking about it though, the way Cobb played his character, the skunk probably would have given it all the gusto he possibly could have in a death scene. For Dock Tobin, it was like he stated earlier in the picture - "Just like a family of old sinners moving on "
As for rest of the Tobin gang, they were a pretty nasty bunch, led perhaps by the meanest hombre of all, old Dock Tobin as portrayed by Lee J. Cobb. The rest of the Tobin's were pretty well cast, with Royal Dano doing another nice job again as the somewhat off center Trout. He kept you guessing as to whether he couldn't speak, or just wouldn't speak, until the confrontation at Lassoo, and even then it's hard to draw a conclusion. But John Dehner I think, might have given the best performance I've ever seen him in. Usually, as a character actor, he's called upon to perform a cardboard cut out villain, but here he really presented a serious obstacle to the film's hero, as well as a challenge to the authority of the Tobin patriarch. He seemed a bit larger than life in his role, something I can't say about a lot of his other work.
Something curious, you would think with Julie London's successful singing career and her casting here as the saloon girl with the golden voice, that she would actually get to sing a song! I wonder why no one thought of that. The other thing I took note of was the price of a train ticket from Crosscut to Fort Worth, coming in at $8.35. I have no idea of the distance involved, but that seemed a little steep for the late 1800's. Maybe that was for first class.
Anyway, a fairly standard Western with the expected outcome, even if the finale seemed a bit forced, with a dead man rolling all the way down a side of a steep incline instead of just dropping in his tracks. Thinking about it though, the way Cobb played his character, the skunk probably would have given it all the gusto he possibly could have in a death scene. For Dock Tobin, it was like he stated earlier in the picture - "Just like a family of old sinners moving on "